'What Distinguishes the Illegible from the Unreadable?'
Four questions from Bruno Reudenbach to Axel Malik about his work 'Increasing Countdown'
Dear Mr Malik, the first work you have created as Artist in Residence for the Cluster of Excellence 'Understanding Written Artefacts' will be released on its website on 1 September and is entitled Increasing Countdown. What does this title mean, what does it say about the work?
Over a period of two years, visitors of the website can follow a writing process that changes daily and becomes ever more complex, beginning with the very first setting on 1 September 2021. From then on, day by day, a new sign-like character and other scriptural trace will be added until 27 September 2023, when the cluster will host a big one-week international conference. Unlike a countdown that ignites at its end, the crucial events take place during the countdown. On each of the 756 days, a new starting and reference point is set for the sequence that has already existed up to that point. At the end, 756 characters will form a complex one-line ‘text’ – which to follow in its entirety will take over an hour. Hence, the countdown increases in terms of both the complexity of the sequence with each added character, and its duration.
Increasing Countdown is an entirely digital work. You have often emphasised that it is not a certain semantics that is constitutive for your signs, but the spontaneous writing movement. How should one imagine this writing under digital conditions, that is, not with a conventional writing instrument and without ink or paint?
This digital writing process is based on a manual act of writing as well. On the outside, the writing pen does not differ from a conventional writing instrument. Inside, it is equipped with technology that sensitively registers the smallest movements and records them precisely as a sequence. In this way, the movement within the writing movement is stored as a pure movement path in a vector file. It is a great advantage that the signs are scalable without restriction or loss. This opens up the scriptural terrain, but it cannot replace writing with ink flow on paper.
To the writing movement from which the characters emerge, Increasing Countdown adds – and I think this is very important – a second moment of movement. The sign-like characters themselves are set in motion and move in a line from right to left across the screen. This distinguishes Increasing Countdown from all your other works, in which signs are firmly fixed on material supports. What prompted you to make this fundamental expansion of your aesthetic means?
It changes the way in which we perceive ‘writing’ and creates a tension when the signs move in this manner, as complex, unstable and fleeting events. The countless structural changes will also reveal new relationships and perspectives day by day. The restlessness, vibration and instability within the writing process correlates with a very calm flow in the passing of the signs. I deliberately wanted to contrast the writing process with how writing and manuscripts are otherwise presented in static form on the cluster's website. The impression of passing characters will direct the perception more towards qualities in writing that are dynamic, moving and to be moved.
In your works, the diverse compositions of signs always evoke associations with script, but without ever being script. This breaking is, after all, a basic motif of your work. So the animated band of signs in Increasing Countdown could perhaps play with the idea of a line of writing or even make you think of the bands with breaking news or stock market prices. Are such associations intentional, are they fruitful or even obstructive and inappropriate?
For me, there is an unresolved question behind what you call 'breaking'. Does it only appear that the signs are signs, are they only pretending to be signs, or are they actually signs? The same can be asked with regard to writing. Do these signs imitate writing, do they merely create a written image, a scriptural appearance behind which no writing can be found at all? And what is it about the illegible that distinguishes itself from the unreadable? For what reasons should a library of readable and distinctive signs be supplemented by a library of illegible signs? We could and should think and talk about this together in much greater detail in order to arrive at an answer. But yes, I am playing with the line of writing, and I am nevertheless and unreservedly serious about the fact that it is about a line in a written artefact.
As for associations, not only are they permissible, but they usually cannot be avoided. If they impose themselves, it seems useful to me to distinguish them from projections. The signs do not know anything about the fact that they are breaking news or share prices for someone or cause them to be associated. Associations tend to lead away from answering the question of what kind of signs they are, what the signs signify, or whether they can signify anything at all if they are not directed at an external content.